Celiac disease warrants growth monitoring in children with diabetes

medwireNews: Researchers have highlighted the importance of monitoring nutrition in children with type 1 diabetes who also have celiac disease, finding that the comorbidity may adversely affect growth.

The found that the average height standard deviation score was 0.36 in children with comorbid celiac disease, which was significantly less than the 0.48 recorded for children with type 1 diabetes alone. The presence of celiac disease did not appear to influence glycemic control, however.

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In all, 3.5% of 52,721 type 1 diabetes patients younger than 18 years had biopsy-proven celiac disease, but the rate varied from 1.9% to 7.7% among the four registries from which the researchers drew their data. The registries covered Australia, Germany and Austria, the UK, and the USA, and Maria Craig (The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) and team attributes the variable celiac disease prevalence to different diagnostic practices between the countries.

As reported in Diabetes Care, White children were more likely than non-White children to have comorbid celiac disease. Nevertheless, 15% of the children with celiac disease were from ethnic minorities, ranging from 9.6% to 22.0% across registries.